I am losing perception of the passage of time. It’s racing by faster and faster. Last I knew, it was August. That’s when the real acceleration began. It became easy to track time in weeks rather than hours or days. I’d start Monday at work, knowing the week was already almost over, and soon enough I was proven right, and a month would pass, and then another.

I hate the passage of time, because I have all these ideas of things I want to work on, three stories of notebooks filled with ideas, commissioning an artist for a logo and some Size Riot artwork, at long last… I got a camera for Xmas, I want to learn macro photography. I got a pop filter for my microphone, I want to record audiobooks; I want to recruit voice talent. I have a hundred ideas and no time to do them.

That is, I have plenty of time. If you give me three empty days with 16 hours in each to do work in, I will crank out a 3,000-word story in the last two hours of the last day. Will it be good? I’ve given up all notion of a good story. I have to: when I raise my expectations for what’s going to come out of my fingers, I lock up. I freeze. Nothing gets produced, because I see myself as having failed before I began. So I had to work my way back to: Well, fuck it. I’ll just write a bunch of crap out that I can delete later. But I don’t delete it, I post it on my rinky-dink blog, where few people will ever see it.

But in 2019, I want to work on better stories, refine my writing, and submit these things for publication. I want to set up a schedule of when to post a Patreon story, deadlines for my commissions, a schedule for building a novel. One novel? Just one? I have three swirling in my head, but I just want to get one nailed down in time for SizeCon 2019. To say nothing of rejuvenating interest in my Smashwords account with newer titles…

GAAH. My mind starts racing and the anxiety builds up, when I think about what I want to accomplish and how terrible my work habits are. So I have to look at 2018 and assess whether I fucked off as badly as I thought I did. Because time passes so rapidly now, I have a difficult time recalling what actually happened within a year, three years, a decade.

Fortunately, this time I wrote most of it down.

January: I was in the middle of writing the “I Will Break You” and “Mine for the Taking” series on Patreon, as well as commissions.

February: Started “Screaming Video” on Patreon, wrote up the results of CruelJan18. More commissions, playing catch-up on neglected series from my blog. Translated a German writer’s shrink fetish stories into colloquial English. Cranking out about three stories at or under 3,000 words each week.

No notes for March. Huh.

In April I attended my editors conference in Chicago. In May I continued “Screaming Video” and commissions, like rejuvenating “As for Ginny” from antiquity. I also started attending a new writers’ group in my city, though we were carefully sizing each other up rather than being very forthcoming with our efforts.

We had an Open Streets in June in our city, where traffic is blocked to make room for bikes and booths of local businesses, and this entails innumerable big, round butts grinding away on little bicycle seats, and this engenders a myriad of size-fantasy scenes and stories. My wife posed with my PocketMe statuette in her cleavage, and I’m wondering how I can turn that into a visual project besides gratuitous boob shots. Started to fall behind on my Patreon series, posting them days late each time. A bad social habit started this month, in which I have a few drinks and talk candidly about my size-fantasy writing to people who aren’t interested or don’t know how to process it. Fine line between owning your passion and self-obsession, I discover in retrospect.

July: On top of twice-weekly kettlebells, I attempted biking to work, a 13-mile trip, one way. Quite a goddamn workout. Key to being a good writer is maintaining other interests, staying engaged with the world, and physical fitness: what’s good for the heart is good for the brain. Then came the third SizeCon (my second) where I connected with some of my heroes and my giantess fantasy unfolded right before me, in this reality. Sold the rest of my paperback books and all my GTS-themed notebooks, came home laden with other writers’ books.

August: Released the stories for GrowthJuly18 for review. Commissions and Patreon updates have halted: something inside me snapped, and I’m unable to write anything. But I notice several other prolific writers are also hitting a wall, so I wonder into what parallel universe I have slipped, since we can’t all be drinking the same water.

September: Another party at which I bore people with the details of my underground fetish scene. One more weekend in which I get very drunk, in an attempt to spur any creative process.

No notes for October. November holds the birthdays of two people extremely important to me. Crucial. Were it not for them, I would not be banging my head against the size-fantasy wall. No record of writing. Note-taking almost entirely absent through December.

Well, 2019’s going to be different. Between photos and consultations with my wife, I’m going to fill up every day of my planner with notes on the day, no matter what happened. I liked that I kept track of the stories I wrote on each day; my wife suggested I write the word count with them, which is brilliant. So really, my size-fantasy life is blending into my real life, as my giant/tiny writing gets recorded into my regular journal, I shoot my drunken mouth off at parties to wider and wider audiences, and I bond closely and personally with certain personages in our scene.

What do I want to happen this year? I have a shitload of projects I want to work on, so what I need to do is talk with someone who’s schooled in Scrum, Lean, Six Sigma, or Kaizen and pick their brain over lunch on how to look at all my projects, prioritize them, and organize them for maximum achievability. Anyone who’s schooled on process and method, because I entirely lack that skill. I want to return to linocuts, take a course on macro photography, set up an audiobook recording studio, and pursue publication in other people’s magazines. I haven’t acted on clay sculptures/miniatures, but I shouldn’t rule that out just yet. Who knows.

I’m returning to formal kettlebell courses. I’m going to make vegetarian lunches for all of January, and I’m cutting back to two cocktails per week (except for celebrations). I’m not a reckless drinker, but booze is a lot of empty calories, and I’m trying to lose my gut. A special fat builds up there that carries its own risk of cancer, and since conservatives are working their hardest to strip the social safety net and benefit the wealthiest 1% at the expense of hard-working, tax-paying Americans, our best insurance is to stay healthy.

But last year wasn’t a bad year. I had a writing crisis, from which I’m still recovering, but it’s getting better. I met a lot of interesting people and am still building new connections and friendships. Politically it was a shit-show, but that fight never ends, and it too bleeds into size-fantasy, both in terms of federal censorship and permitting bigots to exist within our scene. There’s no reason 2019 can’t be different, even an improvement.

2 Comment on “My 2018: Was It as Bad as It Felt?”

Right there with you on anxiety-paralysis. I don’t do nearly enough exercise, but yard- and housework provides a ready distraction, and while I’m raking or dish-washing or whatever, I feel productive and I usually find a new handhold on whatever mental problem I’ve been grappling with.

My wife joined The Happy Planner™ cult. Perhaps some of it will rub off on me.

I’ve been trying to get in the habit of bullet journaling. I do really well with visual to-do lists, things I can see and recall and check off one by one. That’s been most successful for me. Even if I only do half the items on the list, that’s still more achieved than if I’d try to do them from my crap memory.

Housework’s absolutely a workout. It’s an option on Samsung Health and my insurance’s self-reporting program. That’s one thing I don’t look forward to when we finally own our own property, all the little repairs and maintenance I’ll be in charge of.